So yes, we can have such benefits... at a limit. Otherwise, we can continue with the current model of individualism that is admittedly very lax in terms of who can make use of it.

I wouldn't go as far as to suggest that all undocumented people aren't giving anything back, but since they are not required to, they may choose to use their income and care to provide for people that they care about. And often, those people end up being those who naturally fall outside of the U.S. jurisdiction. A legal system that always gives and takes nothing isn't sustainable, as many early governments quickly found out. There has to at least be some sort of payment, whether by taxes or by individual fees, to balance the cost of running the service. If we have people who are not obligated to pay those dues, we run into the issue of a system that gives more than it can handle, because its resources are at a deficit.

While I personally believe that having those three things would be beneficial to everyone's lives, we have to be careful about who it applies to. At the current moment, we have a very large population of people who are not citizens, but also not on visas or any other permit that would allow them to be legally within the borders. Do those benefits extend to them? If not, then the basic limitation of requiring a valid ID would be a great step to providing legally approved people the care they need. But what if we want to extend these benefits to anyone, regardless of adequate documentation? Then we run into the trouble of a growing population of people who use these services but often are not burdened by the need to actually give anything back. They might do so, but they are not required to do so.

You consider that the bare minimum, but in actuality the bare minimum is shared morality. A shared sense of morality is the bare minimum for safety and solidarity because it provides the common ground of acceptable actions people can take. Anything after that is improvement to quality of life.
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In general, the three things listed (unemployment support, paid maternity leave, and health care) are not required or even at the very least something that governments have to have. It is simply by the nature of how we want our morality to be, namely as altruistic as possible. Those three things are appealing and consistent with the idea that we should reduce overall suffering, but are not required to do so. However, those three things cannot be accomplished for everyone on the individual level, so it is morally consistent to expect the "warden of the people" to take steps to providing those options.

I acknowledge what you're saying, but I reserve my right to be angry by the fact that multiple academic institutions in the U.S. continue to decide that they should hold Asians to different standards compared to other races, or outright deny people just because they aren't black or latinx or whichever other protected race you can count off.

It's a bit like looking at a very twisted playground. One kid tries to be like the popular kids and gangs up on the other unpopular kid, and then demands more attention from the other kids because they're going against the common target. Not surprising to me that it'll take seconds for institutions to be accused of being biased against black people, and yet it takes decades of operation and two years of investigation from the Department of Justice to come to the conclusion that one of the many offenders are in fact guilty of being selectively biased against people of Asian descent.

I mean, if France never killed all those cats out of superstitious fear, there would certainly be less rats to have spread the plague back then.

I disagree that the first photo merely shows disagreement (and neither show an actual argument happening), although I have to concur that this is not disconcerting. Attitudes don't change so fast in a society, not without a concentrated effort on "educating" children to politically lean one way (or brainwashing adults, though I'd like to exclude that possibility). The fact that these photos, separated by a little less than a generation, can be taken and put side by side is remarkable and a good indicator that we haven't reached dystopia levels of cognitive conformity.
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I would say more, but I don't know enough context about the second photo to really say much for or against it.

For the point on the American perspective-- yes, American people as a crowd tend to overreact when their personal beliefs are challenged on a federal level. The civil rights movement (and today) show just that. We can't necessarily change that, but I do not believe that this should be protected or held in high regard. If the majority of people show support for a belief that we can demonstrate will bring physical or *very clear* mental harm to any group of people, there is an obligation on the governments' end to ensure that the targeted group is lifted from the spot of the scapegoat without retaliating against any other population under their jurisdiction. Simply requiring wearing a mask is by no means suppression. Any attempt to claim otherwise is mere dishonest leveling.

I wasn't trying to suggest that you believe that masks are not mandatory, my problem was only with that specific point of comparison you made. Perhaps I was too aggressive with my wording, but my point was that in the case of masks, I see no moral or social issue with mandating mask usage as doing so brings more benefits than not (and not doing so results in demonstrable harm). The worry about a slippery slope can only come from the people accepting changes that bring no clear benefit, such as decreasing the budget of an incredibly over-funded sector by a negligible amount.

Could there be other ways of deterring reckless behavior? Perhaps, but if there is any better evidence that doing so would be less effective, please consider the increasingly large amount of people in the U.S. who prefer to not wear a mask in spite of the growing number of cases. We can do everything short of mandating it with law, from distributing free masks to listing all of the health benefits, but you will still have risk-takers who decide that such do not apply to them. With a law, you set down the line for what is inexcusably risky behavior.

Aside from the horror stories that show up about how the virus can inflict total organ failure on some people, it has already been shown to be highly infectious. From an epidemiologic standpoint, its health implications for the very old (and then some) is indisputable, and thus not wearing a mask creates an unacceptable risk. I can compare this to common road laws. You are perfectly allowed to not drive on the right-hand partition of the road, if you are skilled enough to dodge incoming traffic and pedestrians. But who is to say that you are that skilled? You put many people on the left-hand partition in an unacceptable amount of risk with that behavior, so it is wiser to mandate with law that you must drive on the right-hand side.

I don't mean to be picky, but I do not believe that civil rights, gay rights, and same-sex marriage are comparable to wearing a mask. With the first three issues listed, we have no list of any sort of identifiable physical harm, whether logically or practically. There is no physical issue with granting people of different skin tones/colors rights as the only "harmful" outcome was that their population rivaled that of the white population. There is no physical issue with granting gay people rights, or at least immunity from legal persecution, because any reasonable study would demonstrate that their legal legitimacy would provide no physical harm to any person within or outside of that category. There is no physical issue with giving two people of the same sex a piece of paper declaring their marital status. But there are demonstrable physical issues with not mandating the wearing of an adequate mask.

I'm glad to hear (read?) that you enjoyed this exchange. Thank you for participating in kind.

Most of the rest of your arguments are interesting, and none I disagree heavily with. In a messy environment that is often the case, attribution should and must be done carefully, but perhaps my main point of contention was in the moderate cases of attribution. Disagreement with a speaker is no grounds to not correctly attribute statements to them, but any additional concerns from mere exposure are certainly points that, when salient, are of the utmost importance to consider. There is no reason to not quote a controversial figure such as Ben Shapiro if your only reason is that you personally disagree with his philosophy, that you find his worldviews offensive, or that you think he smells funny. But, as you mentioned, there is every reason to reconsider whether you would like to quote Hitler if you are unable to put in words the specific information required to divorce authority from attribution.

As for my second bomb scenario, I will concede its hypothetical construction is rather weak. We can still assign moral blame onto Person C if we declare that he was negligent in preparing the detonation site, in whichever specific context we use. The second scenario would have been strengthened if I declared that Person C was given no reason to believe that anyone would be nearby, and that chance had it that people either found or forced their way near the bomb.

I'll argue that my bomb scenario can still be directly applied to a person posting a message on social media. When we post a message, we aren't seeing how it affects people in real time. We are shut out from a world of strangers' reactions, and for those of us who are not followed by a few active users, we fail to understand if or when our posts will bring about any effect. We are blind to its results until much later, usually through reactions that are posted *after* the post has had its course. For those of us with a rather large following, the impact can be rather immediate, but that does not indicate that that we can directly observe the effect nonetheless. We are only experiencing a fraction of it, since the effects we're aiming to analyze will be entirely within the minds of others. We may have the means to make an inference as to what the effect is, but we won't have any means of directly observing those mental results.